Apple CEO Tim Cook talks color quality at Goldman Sachs conference

Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke at Goldman Sachs' Technology and Internet Conference yesterday. He touched on a wide range of topics from what Apple plans to do with its cash horde to the state of its retail operation. When it came to a question about making lower cost products, Tim used display quality to help make a point about creating great user experiences:

The truth is, customers want a great experience and they want quality and they want that a-ha moment each time that they use the product, and that's rarely a function of any of those things.

If you look at displays, some people are focused on size. There's a few other things about the display that are important. Some people use displays, like OLED displays, the color saturation is awful. And so if you ever buy anything online and you want to really know what the color is as many people do, you should really think twice before you depend on the color of the OLED display. The Retina display is twice as bright as an OLED display. I only bring these points up to say there are many attributes to the display, and what Apple does is sweat every detail.

He makes some fair points here. If a display is not bright enough to view in all conditions, not efficient enough to get you through a whole day or accurate enough to display your favorite content, the experience of the whole device suffers. Choosing the right display technology is certainly a critical part of the design process.

OLED technology's power consumption and saturation issues have been well established already. What I find most interesting in Tim's comments is the idea that high color saturation is intrinsically a bad experience. It certainly has been that way so far but the difference between a great color experience and the gaudy oversaturation of today's OLEDs is in exactly the kind of implementation details he's describing above.

OLED and emerging LCD technologies, like quantum dot displays, can actually show a much wider range of colorsthan today's devices– over 40% more of the color that our eyes can detect. This means that, when paired with the right content, high saturation displays can more accurately reflect the world we see around us resulting in a more lifelike, immersive experience.

But how do we get wide color gamut content into consumers hands?

It's a lot like the chicken and egg/content and technology dilemma facing 4K TV makers with two key differences- wide color gamut can be delivered with no change in file size and there's plenty content out there already. As an example, movies have been shot for decades on media, both film and digital, that has a much wider color gamut than your TV does today. Much in the same way that 4K TV's can upscale HD video, it's also relatively easy to manage the color on a device to make it backwards compatible with today's content.

OLED implementers have thus far been content to take advantage of the extra pop that added color saturation provides when comparing devices on a store shelf. They've left a tremendous amount of overall ecosystem value on the table. It's possible to deliver video in cinema-level color quality to mobile devices, to offer developers the tools to take full advantage of a wider color palette and to implement accurate color management for existing content. Wide color gamut is ready now, it's just waiting for the right device maker to come along and put all these pieces together to perfect the experience.